Movember Wrap-up

At the start of December, it’s time for a lot of us to shave off our glorious Movember badges from our upper lips. This year, MoMagnets did an absolutely amazing job raising money for Movember. At the time of writing, we’re sitting at just under $2400! An incredible effort by Magnet Forensics and all of those that helped with their generous contributions.

My ‘stache didn’t quite get to where I wanted to this year. It was close, but it was another connector-less Movember for me. I was almost able to get some twisting done for some not-so-legitimate connectors. Oh well… Here’s what I ended up rocking for most of the month:

My final Movember creation: The Anti-Connector.

Matt Chang definitely took the lead for raising the most of all the MoMagnets members at over $700! Mica Sadler is sitting in second at just under $400. That’s nearly half the team’s total between these two beauties. We also had a very gracious contribution from our CEO that I wanted to call out. Thanks so much, Adam!

There’s still a bit of time left before donations are closed for the 2013 Movember season. We have until the 9th to get some final contributions in! If you’re feeling generous, please visit our team page and make a contribution. Every little bit helps, and we greatly appreciate it!

Articles

Top 5 Reasons People Love Their Jobs and How You Can Love Yours, Too: Some great points on why people love their jobs. Some of these may be pretty obvious, but it’s important to be reminded about what keeps people engaged. Among the top things: the work culture, the amazing people you get to work with, and autonomy. If you’re trying to create an awesome place to work (or if you’re looking for an awesome place to work) then these are probably things you’ll want to focus on!

5 Things Zapping Your Company’s Productivity: Ilya Pozin always has some interesting articles. This article takes the perspective that some of the fancy perks or awesome processes you have in place may actually be hindering productivity. One common theme that was brought up under two separate points in this article is that sometimes people need a spot where they can work in peace. People like having an fun collaborative culture, but many personality types require some quiet time in order to buckle down.

Reduce Your Stress in 2 Minutes a Day: I’m not the type of person that truly believes doing one tiny thing for only a moment every day is going to have an enormous positive impact on your life. However, I do think that if you can take the time to try and do a few little things here and there, that overtime, you’re likely to have more a positive outlook. In this article, Greg McKeown shares a few tips on relaxing and trying to regain some focus. I don’t think it’s anything that’s going to be life-changing, but it never hurts to think about different ways to catch your breath.

Code Smells – Issue Number 3: This is an article I wrote about Code Smells. This entry talks about the use of exception handlers to guide logical flow in your code and alternatives for when your class hierarchy starts to get too many very light weight classes. As always, I’d love to get your feedback. If you have other code smells, or a different perspective on the ones that I’ve posted, please share them in the comments!

5 Bad Thoughts That Will Throw You Off Track: This short little list is worth a quick read through. There are a ton of things that distract us every day, but the distractions you can easily control are the ones that you cause. Examples? Don’t take on too much at once. Don’t try to make every little thing you do perfect. It’s a quick read, but well worth the reminder!

Not Crying Over Old Code: Another programming article for this week. As the article says, the common meme for programming is that your old code is always bad code. However, there should be a point in your programming career where old code isn’t bad, it’s just different than how you might have approached it now. If your always experiencing your old code being bad, then maybe you’re not actually that great at programming yet! Or… maybe you’re just too damn picky.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code: This article by Cecily Carver is something I’ve been hoping to come across for a while now. It’s another programming article–a good read for experienced programmers but incredibly important for newbies to check out. Cecily covers some of the roadblocks you experience early on, like code never (almost never) working the first time, or things you experience throughout your programming career, like always being told of a “better” alternative. I highly recommend you read through this if you dabble in programming, or if you’ve ever considered it.

Please visit our team page for MoMagnets and make a Movember contribution if you’re able to! Remember to follow Dev Leader on social media outlets to get these updates through the week. Thanks!

Articles

It’s official: Video games make your brain bigger: I don’t have much time for video games anymore, but this is still totally awesome news. It’s in. It’s official. Video games can actually make you smarter. How great is that? If you’re like me and you find you don’t have much time for games any more, it might be worth picking up a hobby game. It’s a great way to relax provided you don’t get too addicted to it and apparently it can make you smarter. Perfect combo!

The myth of the brainstorming session: The best ideas don’t always come from meetings: I thought this article was pretty interesting because we do a lot of brain storming at our office. Sometimes I like to think the sessions go smoothly or that they’re productive. When I contrast them with particular cases that are a bit out of our ordinary approach, it seems like there are certainly some factors that improve the outcome.
We’ve been dabbling in some personality tests to understand team dynamics a little bit better. To the article’s point, extroverted personalities almost always overrun introverted personalities in a brainstorming meeting from my experience. It’s really unfortunate actually and clearly not really fair if everyone is supposed to be getting their ideas out. In order to get the best results, I think that everyone needs a way to get their thoughts out, and sometimes it’s not doable if you have certain people overrunning others.
The article also touches on a fear of judgement concept that I think certainly holds true. In a recent brainstorming style meeting, instead of having individuals put on the spot and discuss their opinions, we white boarded them all at once. There was anonymity aside from when the person right beside you writing could peek at what you were putting down. The results were much better than any of our previous meetings of this style. I can’t be entirely sure that the whiteboarding was the reasoning, but it’s definitely something I’d like to try again in the future.

Matt Chang – Team Magnet Recognition: This is a post I put out earlier this week. As part of my attempt to recognize the amazing team of people I work with at Magnet Forensics, I decided to write up about our superstar customer/tech support. I know I’d never survive in a tech support role, so I have even more respect for Matt Chang being able to do such a good job. He’s been a great addition to the team, and he makes our troubleshooting of customer issues infinitely easier. Thanks for all your amazing work, Matt.

6 Talent Management Lessons From the Silicon Valley: In this article by John Sullivan, he discusses talent management in the valley. The fundamental idea here is that it’s all driven by innovation. Some key take away points from the article is that innovation is actually a more important goal than productivity and the ability to move fast has a huge affect on this. Additionally, people who innovate want to have an impact. Sharing stories about how previous feats have proven to have a great impact can also be a great driving force.

Quality & Agility in Software: Session With Paul Carvalho: This is another article I put out this week about Paul Carvalho who came to speak to our development team. Simply put, the time we had with Paul was packed with information and activities. Every second we spent with him felt like we were absorbing something new and useful. It was far too short. We had lots of great learnings to take away and bring to our own drawing board. We’re excited to be implementing some changes in the upcoming week.

Rather than Whine, We Can Learn from the Boring Aspects of a Job: Mohamed El-Erian reminds us that even the most interesting and glamorous jobs have dull moments. We shouldn’t whine or avoid these situations–they’re vital stepping stones. It’s not realistic to assume you can cut every corner and take every shortcut to get exactly where you want in your career and in life. You have to work hard at what you do and embrace even the small things that can seem boring and monotonous.

Fragments: Creating a Tabbed Android User Interface: This is yet another one of my posts that I shared this week. This is my first Android tutorial, and I’m pretty proud of it! It’s very basic, has lots of pictures, and all of the sample code is available to download. I’m confident that anyone interested in picking up Android programming would be able to follow along. Even experienced programmers looking for a way to get a tabbed user interface using fragments in their Android app should find some benefit too! I just found out today that my tutorial made it into the Android Weekly Issue #76, so that was pretty exciting. You can download the app too (it’s pretty basic) to see what the end result will be. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Remember to follow Dev Leader on social media outlets to get these updates through the week.

Matt “Chang-a-rang” Chang

If you saw this post, then the face above is no new face to you. You’re familiar with that beautiful ‘stache already. Okay, so I’m being a little misleading… Matt Chang doesn’t walk around with that glorious caterpillar on his face all year round. We’re working on that though.

You’re likely wondering why I’m putting incredible pictures of Matt Chang on the web and why I’m even writing this. Previously I mentioned that I want to start recognizing the people I work with when I feel that they’re going above and beyond. I did this with Cam Sapp not too long ago, and I plan to keep doing it for all of the great people I work with. There are a million ways to recognize someone, whether it be in team meetings, personally, or by doing what I’m doing right now. I hope he finds it at least mildly embarrassing, and I hope you get to realize just how important Matt Chang is to Team Magnet.

The Origins of The Chang

It must have been just under a year ago now when we were going out to recruit, if my calculations are correct. Based on the density of moustache growth that was on Matt Chang’s face, it must have been pretty late into M/November. We had an instantaneous bonding moment when Chang, my colleague Tayfun, and I stood at our Magnet Forensics booth and introduced ourselves–With our mighty ‘staches. It just goes to show you that we were all on the same page when we made the conscious decision to leave our nose sweaters on when going to a public event. Needless to say, our conversations with Chang went great, and he was definitely our top candidate for the position based on everything we had heard from him.

In the early days, having Matt on board with us didn’t affect my day-to-day all that much. If there were customer questions/concerns coming in, he wouldn’t necessarily be able to answer them because he was brand new to the product. Completely expected. The only difference in my work was that now I’d periodically chat with a ‘stacheless Chang about potential bugs or customer questions. (I’ll get to the good stuff a bit later, hold your horses).

Aside from work, Matt Chang was a great addition to the Magnet culture. He’s one of our pro-star soccer players, and even the sales and marketing side of the office like him! They’re a tough crowd too, so that really means something. Whether it’s because it’s required by his job or just because he’s an awesome dude, Chang is incredibly approachable and easy to get along with. Simply put, he was a damn steal for us.

Above and Beyond

So now you know a bit about Matt Chang. Pretty sweet guy, right? No doubt. So what’s actually so good about Chang (aside from being able to grow a beauty ‘stache and being a great team player)?

Chang is our front line tech support guy. It’s probably the toughest position we have at Magnet. For anyone that knows me on a personal level, I get over the top sarcastic when I’m frustrated (actually, I’m almost always sarcastic). And sometimes I find it hard not to get frustrated when I hear things aren’t going right for the customer. Whether it’s actually a fault of our own or if the customer has misunderstood some instructions that were provided to them, it gets me pretty riled up. “We must be geniuses if we let that slip by us” and phrases like that are things I’ll mutter under my breath. It’s not positive thinking, but I’m working on it. Of course, I know just who to learn from.

Matt Chang always keeps his cool. Not only is he servicing customers all day, he has to put up with the development team’s crap. He does such an incredible job of it though, which is why I have to call him out. No matter how much effort he has to put into a customer support ticket (even if it’s a really small issue that the customer just really needs help with) he’s calm, collected, and gets them what they need. On the customer side of things, Matt Chang does an excellent job of ensuring that the customer is happy when they’re done talking with him.

That same Matt Chang is also a blessing from the developers’ perspective too. Before having Chang on board, and even in his early days when he was getting on board and learning our products, there would be a lot of back-and-forth with customers. If a support ticket came in, we’d have a lot to figure out. What was the customer seeing? Did they have debug logging on by chance or was there a crash log? Was it reproducible? Did they actually put their license for the product in the right spot? The questions would go on, but of course, Chang would take care of the customer in the end. At this point, Chang is an absolute super star. When he comes up to me to ask about a support issue, he’s already collected the information he needs. Sometimes, he’ll give me a heads up and tell me that he’s already getting the information I’d require, and he’d offer up what he thinks is happening. Hell, at this point in time, Matt Chang will go directly to the person who worked on the feature or previous bug fix to get even more information. He’s quick to get developers the information they need to debug a problem, and that’s absolutely awesome for us.

Tech support used to be invasive for the developers, but it was always handled reasonably well for the customers. Chang has taken it up a notch on both ends and made it relatively pain free for developers to help or look into issues while customers are kept quite pleased with the responses.

Wrappin’ It Up

We’ve received praise from our customers for a long time now that our product, Internet Evidence Finder, makes a big difference in investigations. It’s always amazing to hear that we’re having a positive impact. A more recent trend is that people are raving about our tech support, and there’s no doubt in my mind it’s because Matt Chang delivers the experience they want. Plenty of companies have cool software or software that has a positive impact, but few have superstar customer support to back them.

We knew Chang was going to be awesome from the day we met him, and he hasn’t let us down once. Thanks for being an awesome addition to Team Magnet, Matt. You hold the bar high, always deliver, and do a kick-ass job around the clock. Our hats are off to you.

I work as a team lead of software engineering at Magnet Forensics (http://www.magnetforensics.com). I'm into powerlifting, bodybuilding, and blogging about leadership/development topics over at http://www.devleader.ca.